Picard for President: Why the (Other) Bald Captain of the Enterprise is a Better Leader than Bush

 

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Emmy-winning television series that charted the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise a century after Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Created under the supervision of Trek mastermind Gene Roddenberry, The Next Generation lasted from 1987 to 1994 and served as the launching pad for four feature films. Yes, I know this geeky trivia by heart and I’ve had intercourse with human females!

 

In addition to vastly improved special effects, “TNG” surpassed the hokey 1960s politics of the original series, such as the “TOS” episode in which a race of half-white, half-black aliens loathe a race of half-black, half-white aliens. (Get it? They’re racists. Racism is bad, okay?) Instead TNG boasted a complex political worldview that often explored the necessity of choosing the lesser of two evils, the proper time for aggression to overtake diplomacy, and other unpleasant shades of gray... such as whether fucking an android counts as emotional lovemaking or futuristic masturbation.

 

At the moral center of these quandaries was Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whom Patrick Stewart played with Shakespearean gravitas and without the use of William Shatner’s signature toupee. The French-born, tea-drinking Picard, who popularized the catch phrase “make it so,” was a refined interstellar emissary—instead of a testosterone-oozing brawler like Kirk—but hardly a pacifist in an emergency. He was a literate, contemplative and judicious leader, the exact opposite of what America has had so far in the twenty-first century. Actually it’s the opposite of what America has had since Abraham Lincoln’s cranium splattered all over the curtains at Ford’s Theater.

 

A handful of satirical Facebook groups nominate Picard for the highest office in the U.S. (Note to Future Generations: Facebook.com is a website that allows millions of people to spy on our friends, have sex with strangers, and waste our time joining pointless “groups” while waiting for death to deliver us from our meaningless postmodern existences.) One such group declares: “In these trying times, the resolute leadership of Jean-Luc Picard and the masculine facial hair of [First Officer] William T. Riker are just what this country needs.” These groups are farcical in nature, but raise a valid point: Picard would make an amazing president of the United States. Why?

 

 

George W. Bush invaded Iraq as soon as the reactionary post-9/11 political atmosphere proved conducive to the Republican agenda. Our leaders did not take the time to plan our occupation and exit strategy; they were rash, sloppy, blithe and hubristic.

 

However, Picard has a far more cautious approach to foreign policy. “History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous,” Picard says in the TNG episode “Symbiosis.” He criticized “cowboy diplomacy” by name in “Unification,” supposedly the first modern usage of this disparaging phrase, which has become synonymous with unilateral American aggression.

 

Picard follows the United Federation of Planets’ Prime Directive of nonintervention, keeping his temper under control unless a situation has no possible peaceful outcome, in which case he responds swiftly and ruthlessly. According to Lieutenant Commander Data, a futuristic android, Picard has an eighty-three percent likelihood of action when faced with emergencies. He is hardly a battle-hungry Klingon, but he certainly isn’t a Green Party voter either.

 

 

In the wake of 9/11 the Bush Administration detained citizens indefinitely without charges, eavesdropped on conversations without warrants, and otherwise subverted the U.S. Constitution. Picard has infinitely more respect for the pillars of Western Civilization. In the TNG episode “The Drumhead,” hostile extraterrestrials covertly unleash a wave of xenophobia on the Enterprise. The crew demands security crackdowns, but Picard has none of it, cautioning that “the path between legitimate suspicion and rampant paranoia is very much shorter than we think.” He proclaims: “The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”

 

 

In the episode “Chain of Command,” a sadistic Cardassian monster tortures Picard, stripping and beating him for hours of interrogations, driving Picard to the brink of sanity. Just as Senator John McCain is one of the few Republicans who oppose torture, it’s unlikely that Picard would ever allow the same treatment of prisoners in his custody. It's a sad statement that a fictional space-faring atheistic Frenchman in the Twenty-Fourth Century defends the Bill of Rights more vigorously than the man who has sworn upon the Bible to do so.

 

Fun Factoid: Patrick Stewart watched recovered torture footage from Amnesty International to prepare for his torture scenes, which are disturbing enough without the mental image of a naked Patrick Stewart.

 

 

While Bush and the Republican Party insist on amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage, and conservatives frequently slander homosexuals as threats to American families, but Picard is far more open-minded when it comes to progressive definitions of identity.

 

In the episode “A Measure of a Man,” a Starfleet cyberneticist wants to disassemble Data for scientific study. Picard protests this decision, but the cyberneticist claims that Data is the property of Starfleet, not a sentient autonomous being. In a legal showdown, Picard dismantles the cyberneticist’s arguments for Data’s inferiority one by one. “Are we prepared to condemn him, and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery?” Picard asks rhetorically. “Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life... there it sits.”

 

How would Bush and the Republican Party react to human-android marriage? (Don’t be so quick to answer: it would allow the self-loathing homosexuals to indulge their forbidden fantasies without going to hell, or whatever it is they believe.)

 

 

For all of his bravado and back-patting, Bush lacks the introspection to alter his decisions when reality clashes with ideology. He is stubborn, doctrinaire, insulated and unable to change course.

 

Unlike Bush, Picard shed his delusions of infallibility when he was a young man. After graduating from Starfleet Academy, Picard started a brawl that nearly killed him, and subsequently realized that he “was no hero, but an undisciplined, opinionated, loud-mouthed young man who was far out of his league; that was a great and painful lesson, and I learned it well.”

 

Over the years Picard discovered that, despite his grandest hopes and best efforts, a quagmire is a quagmire and there is no reason to die for a hopeless cause. “It is possible to commit no error and still lose,” Picard says. “That is not a flaw, just life.”

 

In the blockbuster film Star Trek: First Contact, Picard is obsessed with revenge after his abduction at the hands of the Borg (“I will make them pay for what they have done!”), but recalls the fate of Captain Ahab and decides on a more rational, tactical approach—as opposed to a suicidal frenzy of blind rage—which ends with the death of the Borg Queen, surely a greater threat to humanity than pissant Osama bin Laden. (Speaking of the terrorist mastermind, Picard has the wisdom to perceive that “villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot; those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.”)

 

Furthermore, according to StarTrek.com, Picard is obsessed with science, which is anathema to Republicans, and “has no interest in politics.” He is clearly a superior leader to Bush in every conceivable way aside from being imaginary. But perhaps in some alternate dimension, some transmutation of the time-space continuum, some faraway corner past the Gate of Forever—someplace that isn’t Facebook—Captain Jean-Luc Picard could win an election to lead the free world. If this mirror universe exists, its inhabitants should not hesitate to make it so.